London’s Soho is well known for its fash­ion­able shop­ping, high qual­ity enter­tain­ment and tight roads. Whil­st explor­ing the back­streets win­dow shop­pers may be treated to the sight of a DJ play­ing live on air by means of Soho Radio’s shop front win­dow. Today pass­ers-by will wit­ness a flurry of music­al activ­ity as Jäger Soho hosts the latest in its series of unique Vinyl Ses­sions.

Jäger Soho is a col­lab­or­at­ive music space, cre­ated by Jäger­meister and Soho Radio. Togeth­er they cur­ate the space with pop-ups, events and live per­form­ances, one such pro­ject is the Vinyl Ses­sions. For this, artists use Soho Radio’s spe­cial­ised stu­dio equip­ment to record a ses­sion dir­ectly to vinyl, which is then played for the first time live on air and today (24th of May 2018) just so hap­pens to be one of those days.

The legendary Jungle Broth­ers are the spe­cial guests and host DJ Matt Smooth has planned a set ded­ic­ated to Hip-Hop released in 1988 to coin­cide with the 30th anniversary of the release of The Jungle Brother’s debut album “Straight of The Jungle”. The New York based trio com­pris­ing of, Mike Gee, Afrika Baby Bam and DJ Sammy B pion­eered fus­ing hip-hop with house music and were rep­res­ent­ing an altern­at­ive, con­scious and cha­ris­mat­ic­ally play­ful side to Hip-hop before A tribe called Quest and De La Soul. I am HipHop was for­tu­nate enough to get a few minutes to ask The Jungle Broth­ers some ques­tions before they hit the air waves.

What do you think of cur­rent state of ‘Hip-hop’?

“There’s so much music out there now that it’s really hard to say ‘the cur­rent state of hiphop’, there’s so many artists, aven­ues, oppor­tun­it­ies for HipHop music” Mike Gee began. “I enjoy cre­ativ­ity wheth­er it’s one side of the spec­trum or the next, wheth­er it be your trap, your grunge your clas­sic hip-hop I’m into it all, there will always be some­thing I like, and some­thing I dis­like, the great thing is there are many choices out there.”

What Impact do you think The Nat­ive Tongues move­ment had on 90’s Hiphop Scene?

Mike Gee Responds: “The leg­acy is still there, I love it, I love the way you see how Talib, Mos Def, that Black­star move­ment and The Roots and Com­mon are car­ry­ing it into this gen­er­a­tion, and I’m thank­ful that our mes­sage was heard and car­ried on.”

What cur­rent artists have you got on your cur­rent playl­ists?

“I do research, that’s what I do.” Afrika Baby Bam begins “it’s dif­fer­ent from like just put­ting music on and just listen­ing to it, I mean, I do listen to Ander­son Pak a lot just for like a vibe, you know and Kendrick has a vibe and J Cole has a vibe. I don’t know all their stuff by titles and everything but, it’s rel­at­ive to my vibe so I will listen more to that. But when I’m research­ing I go across the board.”

You are given the chance to pro­duce a ‘fantasy col­lab­or­a­tion’ track with a live artist and a deceased artist who would you chose to fea­ture on your track?

DJ Sammy B responds: “From the past, Michael Jack­son, I loved Michael Jack­son grow­ing up, I would just love to see the Jungle Broth­ers with Michael. My mod­ern artist would be Com­mon Sense, I like Com­mon He’s Afro­centric and he’s keep­ing it for our people.”

Before we knew it our time was up, and the crew were ushered into the radio stu­di­os to com­mence their live inter­view and record­ing ses­sion. Mike Gee was inter­viewed by Matt Smooth who pro­ceeded to play a sizz­ling selec­tion of hiphop tracks released in 1988 along with The Jungle Broth­ers entire debut album “Straight The Jungle” which can be heard on Soho Radio’s mix­cloud via the link below:

Mean­while Afrika Baby Bam made the smooth trans­ition from “inter­view mode” to “ever ready MC mode” as he pre­pared to make his vocal con­tri­bu­tion to the day’s Vinyl Ses­sion along­side DJ Yoda and Joel Culpep­per. Click here to watch a video of the event live streamed.

Whil­st listen­ing and watch­ing why not try this refresh­ing Jäger­meister based cock­tail that we were intro­duced to on the day;

1 Shot of Jäger­meister chase with ginger beer, a dash of cucum­ber water and a squeeze of lime!